Sickness

Sickness is a terminal status affliction that, if untreated, will cause instadeath after a few turns. The main causes are eating too old corpses, special attacks, and cursed unicorn horns. The main remedies are applying a non-cursed unicorn horn, casting cure sickness, and quaffing certain potions.

The game uses "deathly sick" to specifically herald this condition, whereas there are many other cases where you simply "feel sick".

Contents

Types of sickness

There are two distinct types of sickness, indicated separately on the status line. You can also suffer both conditions simultaneously. The effects and remedies are identical, except that only food poisoning can be cured by vomiting.[2]

Food poisoning

Food poisoning is only acquired by eating an old ("tainted") corpse or glob. It is marked by the text FoodPois on the status line. The initial time until death is set to 10-19 turns.[3]

Food poisoning is completely preventable in vanilla NetHack if you don't eat old corpses. A corpse is too old to eat after 6*(9+1d20) turns, where 6 is replaced with 8 if blessed and 4 if cursed.[4] Corpses left by undead except wraith are always pre-aged by 100 turns; eaten immediately, they have 40% chance of causing food poisoning. Old corpses can be rendered safe to eat by tinning them.

The first time you contract the illness, a turns-to-live timer is started, set to between 20 and (19+Con). Each additional illness attack while you are Ill divides the remaining turns-to-live by roughly 3.[5]